This document outlines potential areas for future research in social marketing. It identifies five key agendas: (1) developing original social marketing theory, (2) analyzing reasons for social marketing campaign failures, (3) examining boundaries and competition faced by social marketing, (4) understanding the politics of social change work, and (5) questions around relationships, data use, and commitment between social marketers and end-users. The document calls for more documentation of social marketing histories, campaign autopsies, and consideration of political and ethical implications as the field continues to evolve.

1. The Antipodean Agenda
Future directions from Australian Social Marketing
(re)Ignite the Fire VII
@stephendann
Stephen.dann@anu.edu.au

2. This is an industry paper
My industry happens to be academia

3. Dr Stephen Dann
• You may remember me from…
• Dann, S. (2010). Redefining social marketing with contemporary commercial
marketing definitions. Journal of Business Research, 63(2), 147-153.
• Dann, S., Harris, P., Mort, G. S., Fry, M. L., & Binney, W. (2007). Reigniting the
fire: a contemporary research agenda for social, political and nonprofit
marketing. Journal of Public Affairs, 7(3), 291-304.
• Challenge I: new dominant logics and the new eras of marketing
• Research agenda I: adaptation and adoption of the new dominant logic of commercial
marketing for social marketing frameworks

4. Research Objectives
• Phase 1:
• What are the perceived unsolved problems?
• Phase 2:
• Where are the calls to arms in the literature?
• Phase 3:
• On a scale of “resolved to unsolved”, where is the problem seen by
respondents (academic/industry/other)
• Prioritisation ranks

5. Methods*Madness
The Procedure
• Observation
• WSMC15
• ANZMAC14
• Social marketing conversations
• Aggregation
• Literature Reviews
• Depth interviews
• Integration
• This project
Personal Sources
• Academic Interviews
• Research Masters, PhD
• Lecturers, Senior Lecturers
• Associate Professors
• Professors, Directors of Centers
• Synonymized for the ethics
• A Senior Research in the Field of
Social Change from regional National
University

6. Problematic Ethical Considerations
• Project has been almost blocked three times
• Researcher is known to the sample
• Reputation is what opened the doors for the interview, reputation is what nearly left the
project in dry dock
• Cohort is too small for anonymous / synonymous responses
• There’s 43 universities, with less than 43 marketing schools, with less than 43 research
clusters…
• Transcriptions*
• Somebody’s RA leaked something important to the press OR
• Legal discovery was used on transcript data
• Not that I’d worry about ‘Big Industry’ reading my notes, but hey…
*This nearly sank the boat. Entirely. A flat refusal by my ethics committee to release funds for the study because interview transcriptions may exist. There goes the method…

7. Why the academy?
• This is for the supervisors
• Honours, research masters, PhD
• This is for the ECRS
• Problem solvers
• This is for the Academy
• Build a problem, build a solution
• Pure Academy
• Foundational principles
Pure
Academic
Applied
Academic
Applied
Industry

8. Research Agenda
(Phase 1)

9. Five Items for Consideration
• Agenda A:The Need for Social Marketing Originated Theory
• Agenda B: The Composition of Failure
• Agenda C: Competition/Competitor Analysis | The Boundaries
• Agenda D: The Politics of Social Change
• Agenda E: The Relationship Question

10. Agenda A: What do we call our own?
• Identifying, claiming, and resourcing different schools of social
marketing thought from within social marketing?
• Does a distinct cohesive scholarly body of authors, theories and institutions
exist within the global pool of social marketing knowledge?
• Does a fundamental truth of social marketing exist?
• Are the histories of social marketing being adequately documented?
Five Items

11. An awkward question(because none of us are getting any younger, and some of us don’t practice what we preach)
Are we preparing for the collective loss of institutional social marketing
wisdom that time and inevitability are bringing towards us?
Retirement | Death | Selling out to the Corporate dollar
Five Items

12. Agenda B: The Composition of Failure
Where are the campaign autopsies? We know more than we need to
know about aerosol cheese, everyone can tell you about the flaws of
the “New Coke” and commercial failures of long dead airlines. Why do
we know so little about the social marketing that didn’t fire?
• Commercial and Practitioners acknowledge failure
• This is an area on non-adoptive behaviour
• We don’t need to fail fast and often, we need to document with the same rigor whether
it’s success or failure
• Happening the UK gov’t, not happening in .au
Five Items

13. Agenda C: Competition/Competitor Analysis
• Three tiers
• competitive pressures facing
• social marketing (Discipline, domain, journal outputs)
• Social marketers ($, grants, eyes of the ministers)
• Social marketing offers (offer versus alternatives, inertia, commercial and spinwash)
Specialist Field (tax accountants within accounting)
versus
Generalised Field (The 1980s “Communications is Marketing”)
Five Items

14. Agenda D: The Politics of Social Change
“Social Marketing as means to translate the intention of policy in actual behavioral
change”
When the Government said they wanted less regulation interfering with people’s lives, we never
thought they meant social marketing campaigns for healthy eating would be withdrawn...We
thought they just meant stuff about the banks.
Are we seen as Agents of the Crown?
The Nanny State? The Butler State?
Big Brother?
Five Items

15. Patrol the Boundaries
Commercial
Marketing
Greenwash
Corporate
Social
Marketing
Evidence or
Ideology driven?
Social change
or
political campaign?Freedom to comply
or
free choice?
Who takes the claim?
Who wears the blame?
What ideology
is not compatible
with social marketing?
Five Items

16. Agenda D: Understand the political implications
• Surely this is a libertarian government’s wet dream – the “self service
individually responsible societal change” is justifying placing all of the
blame on the consumer, and requiring none of the government
spending on support.”
What are the consequences of social marketing for political agendas if
we are all of the social change agenda?
Five Items

17. Agenda D: Emergent outside of social marketing
• Discussions of the role of the state
• Discussion of nudge
• Mols, F., Haslam, S. A., Jetten, J., & Steffens, N. K. (2015). Why a nudge is not
enough: A social identity critique of governance by stealth. European Journal
of Political Research, 54(1), 81-98.
Where does the state draw the line on intervention?
“I’m feeling a bit bruised from being nudged”
Five Items

18. Agenda E: The Relationship Question
• Part A: Big Data, Big Society, Big Problem
• Yes we can, no we shouldn’t, and before somebody does, we really need to
talk about why big data predictive social change is that stuff the dystopian
novelists write about.
• “Hello, we’ve detected from your Amazon Kindle reading material, Tindr and
Facebook activity that you’re 56.7% more likely to require an STI screen… Mrs
Robinson. Please confirm your check up date from the range of free times
we’ve observed in your weekly FitBit routine.”
• Who would be the social marketing Ashley Madison hack?
Five Items

19. For every sufficiently advanced
dystopia, there’s somebody looking
misty eyed into the distance saying
“I could make that nightmare into a
reality, and it would be glorious…”
Five Items

20. Agenda E
• Part B: Relationship Marketing
• Trust
• Does social marketing violate the principle of trust?
• Commitment
• Do we provide committed resourcing when developing a social marketing programme?
• Do we expect commitment from the end-user?
• Reciprocity
• Where does the invisible hand scratch itself?
Five Items

21. Questions?
Five Items